Meanwhile, in the early 2010s, the company shifted its focus from “music enthusiasts” to what it calls “lean-back consumers”, effectively the kind of people who would once have turned the radio on in the morning and left it burbling in the background all day. The purpose of the playlists it designed to target them – “chill vibes”, “mellow morning”, “mood-booster” – was, and is, to provide unobtrusive background noise or, as Pelly suggests, a latter-day equivalent to muzak: nothing striking, unusual, out-of-the-ordinary, or indeed any of the things one might reasonably want music to be. The message that quickly filtered through to artists was that the more beige your sound, the more likely it was to find a place on a Spotify playlist and earn some cash. Hence the rise of a homogeneous genre dubbed “Spotifycore”, which you’ve doubtless heard even if the term seems unfamiliar. It’s a bit ambient, a bit electronic, a bit folky, a bit indie, a nonspecific wish-wash possessed only of a vague wistfulness, the sonic equivalent of a CBD gummy: music “for any place, for anyone”, as one producer put it, that ends up being “music for no place, for no one”.

Spotify encouraged it, developing an “optimisation tool” called Spotify4Artists that urged musicians to examine the data, see what is doing well and tailor their music to be more like that. Given how hard it is for musicians to make a living in the 21st century, you can understand the pressure on artists to join this particular race to the bottom. “To be sustainable,” says one indie record label executive dolefully, “you have to put out records that are going to get repeat listens in coffee shops.”